Graveyard Dust

by Barbara Hambly

  Her glance ducked away from his. “Oh, no, sir. That is—Michie Isaak came here many a time, with Mamzelle Célie. Not to the house, of course, because of Madame. But Madame was here that night, and all the other servants. Someone would have heard, if he’d tried to come in.”

  She curtsied deeply, as they stepped through the archway and onto the brick banquette of Rue St. Louis. “I gives you good day, sir.” Her smile was friendly and completely unreadable. Then she turned and disappeared into the shadows behind Laurence Jumon’s expensive carriage-team, glimpsed once more as a swift flash of red-and-purple tignon in the sunlight of the courtyard beyond, then gone.

  NINE

  January looked around him at the quiet street. As Jumon had said, half the town houses were shuttered, and the knockers taken down from the doors, the planters long since gone back to their acres, the bankers and brokers fled to cottages and cooler breezes by the lake. Dragonflies darted and whirred above the sparkle of the gutters.

  Isaak had a key, thought January. He might not have been strong enough to use it, though. And if he went to the quarters above the kitchen, every servant in the place would hear.

  But Isaak had been there. Somehow, somewhere …

  He took a step or two down the brick banquette and scanned the street again.

  Even the shops in the ground floors had a deserted look, as if this were Boston, where they kept the Sabbath like good Protestants thought it should be kept. The only activity, indeed, was on the shop floor of the Jumon house itself. The shop there was old-fashioned, with small square panes of glass in the window like the dark little boutiques he’d seen in Paris, fitted up before the Revolution and before one could obtain large panes of glass. These panes had been painted with letters of red and gold, which a young workman was now patiently scraping away:—LIOTTE, FINE WINES AND BRANDIES.

  January strolled to the shop door, looked past the young man into the large, empty salon. Even the counters had been removed, leaving only bits of sawdust and straw on the floors. A few stray chairs, a table, and a couple of wheelbarrows; old-fashioned chandeliers and sconces; a smell of varnish and soap. Of course, there would be no gas laid on in a building this old. Through a door at the back, a smaller chamber could be glimpsed, and the edge of a brick fireplace. “Excuse me.” January addressed the workman in his most Parisian French. “Monsieur Jumon told me that I might have a look at the shop floor.”

  Virgin Mary don’t let him come out right about now.

  Given what January knew of his own quarrels with his mother he knew he was probably safe.

  “Go right on ahead,” said the young man with a grin, pausing in his work. “You with Michie Braeden? Dentist what’s movin in?”

  “He’s commissioned me, yes. I won’t be but a moment.”

  “She led me through a dark hall, to a smaller chamber, lit with a fireplace.…”

  The flue would communicate, January guessed, with that in the rear parlor above. Straw mats had been laid down to protect the floors. More were piled in a corner. Easy to obtain a sheet from the laundry, a cushion, and a pitcher from Mathurin’s office—too much risk of being heard by the other slaves, to slip into the kitchen.… A large cabinet of dark walnut, its baroque multiplicity of tiny drawers and compartments speaking of dentistry rather than wine, had already been moved in. It filled one wall.

  The town-house bedrooms would be two floors above. There wasn’t even a window looking back into the court. This close to Rue Bourbon it would be easy to find a hack, even at midnight.…

  January smiled and bestowed a half-reale he couldn’t spare on the sign painter, then made his leisurely way across the street to Au Cheval de la Lune, a tiny shop that sold laces, fans, perfumes, and books. “Pardon me,” he said, bowing, “but you wouldn’t happen to know where”—he fished hastily in his mind for what the wine merchant’s sign had said on the hundreds of occasions he’d passed it over the last eighteen months—“M’sieu Guliotte has moved to, would you? I was told he had a small stock of vintage St.-Macaire for sale.”

  The woman behind the counter replied at once, “M’sieu Guliotte’s opening again on Rue Condé, between St. Philippe and Ursulines. But that won’t be for another two weeks.”

  “Good heavens,” said January, in a tone of surprise, “when did he move out?”

  “Just not even two weeks ago,” she answered. “They had the place cleared out within two days, getting it ready for new tenants to move in on the first. A dentist, a nice German gentleman.”

  January remained a few minutes more, chatting leisurely with the shopkeeper, who like everyone else had little custom this time of year. He saw the blue carriage with its dazzling white team emerge from the gate and trot smartly away up the street, saw servants come out and close the gate behind. Stepping out onto the banquette once more, he studied the tall, pale blue town house, uncommunicative in the flat smoky glare of afternoon. Remembering another respected scion of a Creole family who had kept slaves chained in the attic. The torn and twisted muscles of his shoulders throbbed as he rubbed them, and his gaze followed the thin colonnettes, the dark latticework of the galleries, up to the dormers in the roof, barred windows like half-shut eyes.

  Madame Cordelia Jumon was over seventy, consumptive, and frail, for all her lively brilliance. Almost certainly a woman to take to her bed as soon as the dinner candles were snuffed, and to stay there.

  And Mathurin Jumon had been in Mandeville the night Isaak Jumon had died.

  Thoughtfully, January donned his hat again and walked slowly up Rue St. Louis, toward the growing tap and rattle of the drums that had begun to beat in Congo Square.

  A man’s voice called out high and free, “Dansez calinda!” and the pulse of drums responded, drawing at the marrow of January’s bones.

  “Higha!” sang out a voice.

  “Malagalujassay!”

  “Higha!”

  “Lajassaychumbo!”

  “Higha.…”

  Men and women clustered the paling fence that surrounded Congo Square, the dusty open space ringed with plane trees, separated from the turning basin by a couple of seedy-looking shacks and from the cemetery wall by only a few muddy streets. Artisans and shopkeepers in their best black or blue coats, new-come from evening Mass at the Chapel of St. Antoine, brushed elbows with Irish shopgirls and chaca laundresses in calico dresses, idlers angling for a look at the dark, half-naked figures swaying and leaping in the Square itself. A few stalls remained of the market that the place had once been, back among the trees: someone was making gumbo at a few pistareens per bowl; a woman sold pralines from a tray, and another, gingerbread, soft and sweet: estomac mulâtres, they were called. Gritty smoke caught January across the eyes as he edged his way toward the gate.

  Oh, yes yes, Mamzelle Marie,

  She knows well li Grand Zombi.

  Oh, yes yes, Mamzelle Marie,

  He come here to make gris-gris.…

  And there she was. Head rolling as she danced, body sending off waves of electricity, like the madness in the summer air before the coming of a storm. Dominating them, drawing them, focusing upon herself the crazy leap of the music—Power.

  And January, watching her, knew it was true. Whatever Power was, Marie Laveau had something beyond her web of secrets, something beyond loyalties, love, or fear. Charisma, the old Greeks had called it; the god, Plato had said. Whites would have termed it insolence.

  Power.

  A seven-foot king snake coiled her body, writhed with the writhing of the dance. Smoke from the gumbo pot veiled her in the dapple glare of sun and plane-tree leaves; and she smiled, drinking something from the air of the Square, from the somber joy of the dancers, as they drank in the Power from her.

  Close by him January heard someone say, “See there? That’s her. Marie Laveau. That’s the Voodoo Queen.”

  The hammer-and-lift of the drumming, the wailing, the dance filled the Square: bone-deep, groin-deep, soul-deep. Pain and memory, loss and hope, wear
iness and exultation at having survived another day.

  “What are they doing, Mama?” asked a child.

  “They’re dancing, dear. That’s how Negroes dance.”

  Men stripped to bandanna loincloths, bells jangling around their ankles, turning the women under their arms. Graceful movements, serpentine as those of the woman on the boxes, absolutely alien to the waltz or the Lancers or the bright beauty of contredanse. Others danced alone, feet planted, bodies swaying, or stepped gaily, highly, in patterns half-remembered, half-invented, faces intent with relief or release, or beaming with joy. Eerie, wailing, the voices rose and fell like storm wind over the Atlantic, like the far-off jangling of chains.

  “Why do they dance like that, Mama?” The little boy was probably thinking about his own experiences with stern-voiced teachers and white gloves and pumps that pinched.

  They dance that way to forget that they have to step off the banquette to let YOU pass, Young Massa.

  They dance that way to forget that they, or those they love, can be sold off like two-year-old colts and taken someplace to be worked to death if their new owner chooses, for no better reason than that their owner wants a new buggy.

  They dance that way so they don’t kill themselves from despair. Sir.

  It was not, of course, a real voodoo dance. Only a get-together, with food pitched in to be shared around, and catching-up on the week. Information—Mamzelle Marie’s wealth—was in a lesser way the currency of them all. When you’re powerless, chained, and naked, you pay a great deal of attention to the doings of those whose whims can take from you what little security you might have. Around the edges under the trees, men threw dice in the shade or chatted up women; here and there sat the voodoo doctors, the root men, the wangateurs. January recognized Dr. Yellowjack among them, with his glazed leather hat and aigrette of heron-hackle, and with him others Olympe had pointed out in the street: Dr. Brimstone and Dr. Chickasaw; and the scar-faced, terrifying John Bayou. People came up to them to speak, or sought out the women in many-pointed tignons or snakebone necklaces, to have their fortunes read. He wondered which of those was Mambo Oba, and what Mamzelle Marie would have to tell him of her. What had looked, at the time, like a simple matter of voodoo rivalry had become a hundred times more dangerous—whoever had paid Mambo Oba had almost certainly also paid Killdevil Ned.

  My reputation will never recover if I go in. January glanced around him. Any of the people in the mostly white crowd outside the fence could be a prospective employer, if not a giver of parties then a parent of children whom they might not want to take piano lessons from a man who’d been seen at the dancing in Congo Square. But Mamzelle Marie would have seen him—at six feet three, with his high beaver hat, he was unmissable in any crowd—and would know if he sought her out in private later, that he had drawn a line for himself at speaking to her here. So he worked his way to the gate, where a blue-uniformed City Guard idled with his cudgel and cutlass, and passed through. Two young women lounged, panting and shiny, in little more than a few kerchiefs covering their breasts and wrought into skirts. But their faces held none of the blind ecstasy that had filled Olympe’s that night at the brickyard; they chatted through the palings with two young white men in the long-tailed coats and bright waistcoats of clerks. As January edged through the gate, one of the clerks gave the girls some money, and they slithered out past him as he went in.

  Laundresses? Seamstresses? he wondered. Slaves making a few reales they needn’t show their masters? His old distaste for the voodoo dances returned.

  Still, he worked his way through the dancers to the crowd around Mamzelle Marie. Men would dance up to her, touch her hand, sometimes kiss her extended wrist, or the shining scales of the snake she held. Women would clasp her hand, or sometimes her ankle, as she swayed on her platform of boxes. A woman selling pralines in the crowd put two of them on the edge of the platform, like an offering. There were other offerings, on the platform and on the ground near the serpent’s cage—dishes of congris or rice, cigars, copper, and silver coins. A piece of pound cake on a plate. The ground around the boxes was wet with rum.

  He waited for Mamzelle Marie to finish her dance, to step down and touch the hands of this woman and that, disciples as Olympe was a disciple, or friends as Olympe was a friend.

  And that, too, he thought, was Power.

  Her eyes glinted and she smiled, lazy and impudent and dangerous, like sunlight on the edge of a knife. “Michie Ben.”

  He removed his hat. “Mamzelle.”

  “I went to the house of Mambo Oba.” A woman handed her a horn cup of lemonade, and Marie Laveau drank thirstily. Sweat streaked her face, wet the edge of her seven-pointed tignon, and made dark blotches on the calico of her blouse. “She’s gone. The house is closed up. Even her cats are gone; her clothing, her money, her calabash rattle and the shell she uses to speak to the loa, gone. The neighbors say she left Friday night.”

  January was silent, chilled. Mamzelle Marie watched him, and with its flat spade-shaped head against her dark neck muscle the Damballah serpent watched him, too.

  “What can I do?”

  Her mouth tucked a little as she thought, maybe wondering what it was that he would be willing to hear. “Pray,” she said at length. “Ask the Virgin Mary, or St. Antoine, or St. Peter to help you, to deliver you from harm. You go to the Chapel of St. Antoine, to the old statue of St. Peter that stands in the back. Put brick dust on your shoes, and carry in your mouth a split guinea pepper, with a paper in it on which you write your wish: Deliver me from Harm. Leave it there at his feet.”

  St. Peter? wondered January. Or that other old man who guarded all doors who carried keys?

  “Then when all is over, and for the best,” Mamzelle went on, “go back and thank him. Leave a piece of pound cake, or a couple of cigars, or a little rice, or silver, at his feet. It’s good to give good things to those who help you,” she added, a dark smile flickering across her face. “And it’s good to tell others still in fear that prayers do get heard.”

  “Well, look at you, pilgrim!” Cut-Arm came up out of the crowd, naked but for a loincloth of bandannas, and jingling bells on his feet. He held a laughing woman on his good arm and another had her hand closed around the loincloth at his other hip. “Didn’t know I was coming to the aid of a toff. Doesn’t a toff like you know better than to go hunt adventure in the Swamp?” January’s rescuer leaned down from his great height to kiss Mamzelle Marie’s cheek.

  “Sometimes you go hunting other things.” January had seen the judgment in the big man’s glance, a scorn opposite to his mother’s scorn: scorn for the clothing he wore, for the culture that was his hard-earned guarantee of advancement in a world where the money that bought safety and peace was all in the hands of the whites.

  “In the Swamp you’re going to find only one thing,” said Cut-Arm. “Same thing you find in all of this whole town. Boys … Ladies …” He addressed the half-dozen men and women who came up around him. The men were near-naked, as he was, slipping now into rough smocks and trousers, the clothing of the poorest of the poor slaves—January saw, a little to his surprise, Colonel Pritchard’s diminutive waiter Dan among them, and with him was the young woman Kitta who’d been with him in the kitchen that night, the woman who’d gone to the voodoos, the woman who was with child. Both touched Mamzelle Marie’s hands, the ceremonial transmission of Power or blessing:

  “Will we see you when the moon comes full?” Cut-Arm asked of Mamzelle Marie, and she returned him her enigmatic smile.

  “It might so be.”

  “Until then.” He kissed her hand. To January he said, “And you, pilgrim, you beware of how you go. The white man’s like a dog, once he gets on the hunting trail. He doesn’t give up.”

  “But why?” asked January, baffled. “That’s what I don’t understand.”

  “That’s what the deer doesn’t understand, minding its own business in the woods.” Cut-Arm laughed curtly. “But the deer ends up in the stewpot
, all the same.”

  Walking away from the Square down Rue d’Orléans through the dove-gray evening, January heard the voices behind him, the dark uneasy music pulling at his heart.

  St. Peter, St. Peter, open the door,

  I’m callin’ you, come to me!

  St. Peter, St. Peter, open the door.…

  Livia Levesque’s house was deserted when January returned to it at last. At a guess, his mother had gone to dinner at the home of one of her cronies, for a comfortable evening of cards, coffee, and the bloody slaughter of every reputation they could lay tongue to—January would have given a good deal to be privy to what his mother had to say to her friends on the subject of Geneviève Jumon. The kitchen doors stood wide, the waxed-oak table scrubbed, and every bowl and pot and cup secure in its place in the cupboard. In the laundry, also open to the dense hot stillness of the evening, a huge tub of clothing soaked, the water faintly yellowed by dissolving slivers of soap. Washboards, irons, a box of starch were laid out ready for the following day. Bella, presumably, was with cronies of her own, sitting under the gallery of some other house in the French town—Bella didn’t hold with going above Canal Street “where all the Kaintuck riffraff lives”—where the family had gone out for Sunday dinner elsewhere.

  In the kitchen a red pottery bowl held jambalaya, protected from flies by a plate laid over the top. Coffee warmed on the back of the stove. January filled a cup, carried both vessels with him up the steps to the garçonnière, his mind already savoring the joy of an evening all to himself in the parlor with the shutters thrown wide to the street, playing on the piano all those pieces that brought him the greatest joy: Bach and Mozart, the overture from The Italian Girl in Algiers and strange old jigs and planxties Hannibal had taught him. His room was dark and the door was shut and he had no idea why he stopped on the threshold, his hair prickling on his head, knowing there was something wrong.